Lina

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“To be a proper man meant to be a strong man, an outdoors man, but also a man of principle. It meant lack of bombast, a repudiation of shallowness and a core of quiet self-belief. It meant being slow to anger, but firm in conviction. Polworth, like Strike, had had to take his male role models where he could find them, because neither had a father who qualified as ‘proper’, and both boys had found in Edward Nancarrow a man worthy of admiration and emulation, whose approval meant more than any school teacher’s star and whose rebukes spurred a desire to do better,”
― Robert Galbraith, The Hallmarked Man

“It is the great misfortune of the coward that he sees danger everywhere, and of the snob that he perpetually underestimates those he considers his inferiors.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Hallmarked Man

“Sometimes new stories are just old stories badly remembered.”
― Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter